Research interests and Projects

Primary Research Interests:

• Information structure

• Syntax, Prosody and Syntax-Phonology interface

• Linguistic/Dialectal Variation, Linguistic Typology

• French Linguistics, Bantu Linguistics, Bantu-Romance connection

• Contact Linguistics/Bilingualism/Multilingualism

Geographical Regions: France, Cameroun, Rwanda, Canada

Some Ongoing Projects:

• First Language Attrition (syntax/pragmatics interface)  and influence of Trauma in adult migrants from Rwanda

• Word order in Bantoid Cameroonian Languages

• BULBasaa Corpus and the phonetics and phonology of Cameroonian French (in particular by Basaa speakers)

Participation in Funded Research Projects:

Collaborator in the FWO project (2023-2026): 

The emergence of syntactic complexity: the first language acquisition of cleft-sentences as a window onto the syntax/prosody/information structure interface.

Principal investigator: Karen Lahousse (KU Leuven)

Co-lead of a Jackman Humanities Institute  Working Group (2022-2023):

Mapping Languages: Working with Kirundi, Kinyarwanda and Tshiluba Speakers in the GTA.

with Suzi Lima and Juvénal Ndayiragije

Connaught New Researcher Award (2018-2021):

Deepening our understanding of African varieties of French through a corpus study of the phonetics and phonology of Basaa-Cameroonian French.

Co-investigator of the ANR/DFG project BULB (2015 -2018):

Breaking the Unwritten Language Barrier 

Alexander von Humboldt Fellow (2011 - 2013):

 What are the grammatical correlates of Information Structure

in Bàsàa and French declarative sentences?

Member of the ANR/DFG project BantuPSyn/SynPhonI (2010 - 2012):

Phonology-Syntax interface in Bantu Languages

Principal Investigators: Annie Rialland & Laura Downing